To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore.

THE BIG SHOWSTOPPER OF ACT II WILL BE "MY NAME IS INIGO MONTOYA:" Playbill confirms that when I speculated in June, I was, for once, right. Tony winning composer Adam Guettel's next project will be a collaboration with William Goldman to adapt Goldman's classic book and film The Princess Bride into a Broadway musical. No word on if Mandy Patinkin will return as Inigo. Casting suggestions are invited along with other general exultation.

Toronto Blue Jays - Bumblebee Man - Comic relief from the other side of the border. Inexplicably, they tend to get a lot of success out of recycled material (sight gags, Shea Hillenbrand) that wouldn't work anywhere else.

Tampa Bay Devil Rays - Hans Moleman - Whenever they're on TV, you can virtually guarantee that they're hopelessly overmatched and that something bad is going to happen to them. You could start feeling bad for them, but then you remember that you don't care.

Cincinnati Reds - Principal Seymour Skinner - Spent much of their existence under the hand of a domineering, insane woman who was impossible to please (Agnes Skinner, Marge Schott). Possessors of a dirty little secret that they would rather sweep under the rug (Skinner's true identity of Armand Tamzarian, Pete Rose). Their lives were given meaning in the '70s (Vietnam, the Big Red Machine) but now all they have to escape the monotony of their everyday existence is the flashbacks.

San Diego Padres - Dr. Julius Hibbert - Sported a parade of laughable fashions in the past. A little shaky at what they do, but they look stellar given the alternatives in the region (Dr. Nick, the rest of the NL West). Bizarre tendency to lose their composure at inappropriate moments.

They're all pretty brilliant, but the Cleveland Indians one may be my favorite of those not listed above.

FLOTSAM & JETSAM FROM THE MUDDY BANKS OF THE SCHUYLKILL: I'm finishing up a project in the office tonight, but felt like checking out some of the less-frequently-followed links down the left side there.

Skelton, according to a list of the top dead stars, is the fifth-most recognizable celeb in the great beyond. Those ten names I mentioned before? Apparently their Q score ranks below that of Lucille Ball, John Wayne, Bob Hope, and Jimmy Stewart, who rank Nos. 1-4. In fact, none of those iconic figures made the top 10, edged out by the likes of Michael Landon, Johnny Carson, John Ritter, Jackie Gleason, and Charles Schultz.

Tellingly, "coming in last on the list was diet guru Dr. Robert Atkins, who died in 2003. Tupac Shakur and Johnnie Cochran also ranked towards the bottom." and "the national survey was conducted by mail questionnaire." Still, though, Red Skelton? Really?

THIS BLOG HAS NOT YET BEEN MUSICALIZED, THOUGH WE'RE IN TALKS: New Yorkers looking for something to do for the next couple of weeks could do far worse than the New York International Fringe Festival. Hundreds of shows for just about every conceivable taste, including "Bridezilla Strikes Back!," the story of a woman who didn't know she would be appearing on FOX's "Bridezillas" till after the fact, "Jesus in Montana," the true story of a man who decided to join a doomsday cult for the fun of it, "The Last Two Minutes of The Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen," which is actually exactly what it sounds like (and it's a comedy!), and "SILENCE! The Musical," a musical adaptation of "Silence of the Lambs."

And that'll do it for me till at least Saturday sometime, as this portion of ALOTT5MA central is moving 4.01 miles (according to Mapquest, at least) across state lines in our continuing effort to get closer to the "action."

MAY I INTEREST YOU IN SATINIQUE WITH NATURE'S EXCLUSIVE RENEWING TECHNOLOGY, OR SHALL I JUST BUST A CAP IN YOU? Spacewoman alerted me to the CNN story about the capture of the two Tennessee courthouse shooters, and in particular the peculiar way they piqued a cab driver's suspicions:

Wagers, 33, said he didn't realize he had picked up the fugitives until he was alerted to TV reports later that evening.

He said his suspicions weren't aroused by anything the couple said, except that they didn't try to aggressively recruit him after telling him they were Amway salespeople.

"You know, Amway people are all about Amway, and when they didn't -- when they didn't try any conversation further about it, that's when I pretty much thought, well, they're not with Amway," Wagers said.

I DID SPOT RICHARD HARRIS PASSED OUT UNDER AN AUSTIN HEALEY. DOES THAT COUNT? 650-year old Dutch brewer Stella Artois always has interesting, well-made ads. One that's right up our alley here at ALOTT5MA is the really cool current campaign, in which viewers are invited to spot the images from classic films in various British land- or cityscapes. Guaranteed time-waster!

Fairchild is not running unopposed -- Robert Conrad and Alan Rosenberg are also campaigning. Which brings up another question: If, as I assume is true, 90% of SAG members are waiting tables to pay their bills, why do they always elect semi-famous B-listers? Wouldn't their interests be better served by electing somebody whose last IMDB credit was "upset Knicks fan" in Air Bud II or something like that?

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

GUESS THEY DON'T TEACH READIN' AT HARVARD LAW: I figure it's time for another TAR Classic thread. Personally, I found TAR2 a little bland since most of the teams (aside from Cha Cha Cha) weren't really that interesting, at least not in a good way. (Tara and Will were, IMHO, almost Jonathan & Victoria level of loathsome.) But TAR3? That's good stuff. Teams are just the right mix of bitchy toward each other and other teams and affectionate, the tasks are solid, the teams wholly distinguishable, and the racing close (in one leg, first and last were separated by less than 40 minutes). The classic moment thus far though, must go to Team Heave, who decided that a clue saying "walk to the pit stop" meant "take a cab to outside the pit stop, then walk in." Add to that the fun of the Bald Snark, the models/twins who actually are kind of good, if not quite as good as they think they are, and Zach's hair, and you've got fun.

My sinful admission? While Flo has yet to reach her ultra-high freak-out level (and I missed last night's "Flo climbs a cliff" episode), I actually kind of like her in some ways. Her French is decent, and that's proven a big advantage to her team thus far. And she's actually kinda cute.

LET'S ALL GO TO THE LOBBY: You know, this summer movie season, despite a few wonderful highs (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Star Wars, and, arguably, Wedding Crashers) has kinda stunk. (Though I actually quite liked The Island despite its bombing.) But Dave Poland reminds us that we're a mere month away from the best fall movie season in recent memory, with pretty much every weekend from September 16 through the end of October offering something interesting, ranging from animation (Wallace & Gromitt, Corpse Bride) to action flicks (Serenity, Domino, The Legend of Zorro) to early Oscar contenders (Elizabethtown, North Country, Proof, Everything is Illuminated) to comedies romantic and otherwise (Just Like Heaven, Shopgirl). So, aside from the obvious, what are you folks looking forward to?

DON'T TELL PATTY AND SELMA: Spurred by a posting over at The Volokh Conspiracy from their new puzzleblogger, a question. Which much-beloved TV show's pilot was directed by "Alan Smithee," the DGA's pseudonym for directors who despise the final product so much that they have their name taken off the project? Answer here. Interestingly, Smithee's filmography also includes an episode of "The Cosby Show."

I'M THINKING THAT THE COMMISH'S NEXT JOB ISN'T GONNA BE AT MCKINSEY: How do you solve the problem of overlong waits at the DMV? The solution, as concocted by the commissioner of Indiana's bureau of motor vehicles? Not hiring more employees or setting up a couple of TVs for folks to watch. No, no, the solution is simply to hide all the clocks, so that people don't realize how long they've been sitting there.

Oh, and they're also rearranging the seating so that irate customers without timepieces can kill a little time by watching each other simmer while they wait to have their pictures taken.

DEATH, BE NOT PROUD, BUT ACTUALLY, KINDA AMUSING: While our good friend Ann Althouse has been all over it, we haven't said much about this final season of Six Feet Under. Yes, the last couple of seasons were something of a mess. Remember "Nate's dead, but only in one of millions of possible universes?" Or "Nate's wife may, in fact, have been sleeping with a relative?" Or "David smokes crack and gets beaten/carjacked?" Or "Ruth is oddly attracted to the undertaking intern?" (OK, that last one was pretty brilliant.)

But this season? Yeah, just good stuff all around. David and Keith's adoption plotline, featuring a bizarre fantasy musical sequence? Check. Claire going to work in a nightmare cubicle farm, featuring her in a production number about pantyhose titled "You Ride Up My Thighs?" Check. Ruth becoming all the more screwed up while dealing with crazy George and horny Ed Begley, Jr.? Check. Bizarre flashback sequence involving Michael C. Hall looking frighteningly like Shaggy from "Scooby Doo?" Check. Nate getting it on with his ex-stepsister? Check. (OK, the Rico/Vanessa plotline is rather interminable, but we can't have everything, now can we?)

But one word summarizes the brilliance of the season thus far. "NARM!" For those of you who gave it up in one of the endless strips of moroseness and poo that plagued the last couple of seasons, it's time to come back.

"We know that 55 percent of all U.S. employees are not engaged at work. They are basically in a holding pattern. They feel like their capabilities aren't being tapped into and utilized and therefore, they really don't have a psychological connection to the organization," said Curt W. Coffman, global practice leader at the Gallup Organization, whose large polling group measured employee engagement. . . .

Although workers may dream of days surfing the Internet with nothing to do, the busiest employees are the happiest, according to a survey by Sirota Consulting LLC. Of more than 800,000 employees at 61 organizations worldwide, those with "too little work" gave an overall job satisfaction rating of 49 out of 100, while those with "too much work" had a rating of 57.

DEAR UPI, IF EW CAN USE THE WORD PUSSY, YOU CAN TOO: This UPI story on Entertainment Weekly's list of the top 10 movie cars is noteable mostly for referring to the yellow pickup Uma Thurman drives in Kill Bill simply as "The Wagon." And while were at it, shouldn't Greased Lightning have made the list?

OF COURSE THIS MEANS THAT NOT A SINGLE EIGHT-YEAR-OLD WILL SEE THE MOVIE: The Harry Potter film series, already noteworthy for its efforts to duplicate the James Bond director-of-the-week phenomenon, has achieved another milestone. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire has received a PG-13 rating due to "sequences of fantasy violence and frightening images."

I guess this means two things: (1) Cedric shall not live to smooch Cho another day and (2) they're gonna use some nifty CGI for Ralph Fiennes' first appearance as You Know Who.

Tuesday, August 9, 2005

THE NIGHT DETROIT DIED: Bluesman (and is there really a cooler job title than that?) Emery "Detroit Junior" Williams Jr. has died. He was 73.

During breaks from college and in the first few years back home, a group of us would make weekly pilgrimages to the Earle on Lincoln Ave. back when the neighborhood still was a little fun (the bar has since become a Tapas restaurant) to drink beer from a can and be enjoy sets from Detroit Junior. The highlight of the evening always was his rendition of his minor novelty hit "If I Hadn't Been High," with its spoken word interlude about the fact that for a fella there ain't no such thing as an ugly woman when you're all doped up on the liquor and the weed. It was always kind of bittersweet when some drunken sorority girl would wander in a song or two after he had poured his soul into "High," put a few shekels in his tip jar, and ask him to play it, oblivious to the fact that the notes from it were still reverberating. Detroit never seemed to mind though, he'd play it again as if it he was debuting it anew, especially if the girl was cute and the tip was generous. I probably last saw him play a decade ago, but still checked the listings from time to time, vowing to get back down to the city for a night out. Alas...

I'VE ALWAYS PREFERRED ITALIAN: Slate asks (and answers) an important question today--What's the deal with ranch dressing? Included in the article are discussions of Cool Ranch Doritos as cultural phenomonon, and the fact that "dunking one's pizza in ranch dressing is a culinary act best described as arterial suicide." Well worth your time on this slow news day.

JOE SCARBOROUGH=LT. WORF: Leading the pack for "bizarre memorials to Peter Jennings" is the New Jersey Star-Ledger's Matt Zoller Seitz with this piece, including an extended Star Trek reference:

He was Mr. Spock to Brokaw's folksy Bones McCoy and Rather's impetuous Captain Kirk -- an alien intelligence from the planet Canada, offering not a hug or even a reassuring pat on the shoulder, but a poker face that was accented, on rare occasions, by a faintly raised eyebrow.

YOU GOT NOTHING TO LOSE: It's another list-topper for Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," which last year headed Rolling Stone mgazine's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. This time "Stone" has been picked by the UK's Uncut magazine as the Most Revolutionary Moment in Pop Culture in a survey that included a few folks who might know what they speak of including Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Brian Wilson, Lou Reed, and, err, Ed Norton. The top 10 was comprised of six songs or albums, three movies, and one TV show.

APPARENTLY, W.C. HANDY WAS WATCHIN' OVER HIM: "Walking in Memphis" singer Marc Cohn was shot in the head in an attempted carjacking earlier today. Miraculously, Cohn was almost completely uninjured. Given that Cohn beat out Boyz II Men, Seal, and Color Me Badd for Best New Artist at the 1992 Grammy Awards, someone's watching over him. (But don't ask me how Michael Bolton's "When A Man Loves A Woman" beat out "Walking In Memphis" as Best Pop Vocal - Male at the same awards.)

HIP, HIP, SO HIP TO BE SQUARE: The fine folks at the San Francisco Weekly would like to tell you a story about a group of developmentally disabled youths and their love for Huey Lewis and the News. About the enduring appeal of Mr. Lewis, the author notes:

"You see, there's no pathos or back story to News songs. They are straightforward ("Stuck With You"), energetic ("The Power of Love"), and easy to relate to ("Hip to Be Square"). These truths are appreciated by a wide variety of music lovers, some of whom just happen to be mentally retarded."

It's well worth your time. Credit to TMFTML, who's managed to find this and beat me to the joke about the NYT's correction relating to the spelling of Moe Szyslak's name (though I would have gone with "Worst. Correction. Ever."

BAD PUN TITLES FOR THIS REVIEW: SO OVER THERE; BLACKHAWK DONE; TAKE THE UNDER ON OVER:Spiders (Kidsmoke), the third song on Wilco's outstanding A Ghost is Born, spends most of its time ruminating over a tightly-coiled two-note bass line. The tension in the song accumulates through this long monotone, like musical Chinese water-torture. Then the song kicks into a big arena-rock anthem bridge, releasing all of the pent-up tension. Taken separately, the song's two parts are pointless. The quiet drum-and-bass part is frustrating; the bridge is, standing alone, not particularly exciting. What is great about the song is the sudden unspooling of all of the buildup in the transition between the two.

Spiders (Kidsmoke) makes an appearance on the first episode of Steven Bochco's aggressively advertised Over There. The way that director Chris Gerolmo uses the song is a pretty good encapsulation of the problem I have with the show. Gerolmo cuts away all of the monotonous build and gives us only the soaring bridge, making it sound like just so much noise on an already loud soundtrack. He does the same thing with the plot of the pilot -- perfunctory one-card introductions of the characters followed immediately by a lot of shouting, some look-at-us-we're-basic-cable obscenity, a long slo-mo gunfight with hyper-violent images (like the top half of a guy getting blown up while his legs stagger forward), a little bit of race-baiting, and then a main character getting his leg blown off on a beer run. It's all punchline, no setup. Over There seems to want the release without putting in the effort to get the tension.

Add to that a ridiculous 80s heavy-metal score (do they even sell guitars with a whammy bar nowadays?), the even more ridiculous Hard Rocking Erik Palladino, and the topical ridiculousness of a show about the war in Iraq that avoids taking any position on the war in Iraq, and it's a recipe for mediocrity. The second episode was a little bit better -- particularly with the addition of an Arab-American private with a Sorkinesque omniscience -- but barely worth the money I paid for it.

One other note: There should be a rule against director/producers using their own musical material on TV shows. Gerolmo's title song is just bad.

IT'LL MAKE A NICE BLOCK WITH "MY SUPER SWEET 16:" Proving that Bob Knight was not, in fact, the bottom of the barrel for "Who Wants To Work For Me?" reality shows, Atoosa Rubinstein has joined the parade. Of course, this begs two questions to the general audience. First, and most obvious, is "Who the hell is Atoosa Rubinstein?" As her bio explains, Miss Rubinstein was the founding editor of CosmoGIRL! (weird capitalization and punctuation in original), and now edits Seventeen. The second question is "Who thought this was a good idea?" MTV apparently did, greenlighting Miss Seventeen, in which (in a model of symetry) 17 teenage girls compete for a job and cover slot at Seventeen, "while inhabiting a loft filled with Seventeen-branded clothes and furnishings." Sorry to borrow a tired old SNL punchline, but who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?

THE JOKE'S ON YOU: Our good friend Scott at L^3 has taken Adam's suggestion and opened up this website to try and create an online blog-chain-letter version of the Aristocrats joke for submission to the contest.

MISS ME? Sorry for the radio silence, but I was on vacation last week on the Michigan Riviera and couldn't get a local dial-up number for Net Zero (which then, thank you Dennis Miller, only took a 20-minute phone call to cancel my free trial). Thankfully from the looks of the sheer magnitude of posts in my absence, it seems the joint hardly skips a beat when I go away. I am slammed with work this week and then away, again, next, so don't expect much from this eighth.

And as for summer reading, if you like macho male adventure non-fiction with a soul (Into Thin Air, Perfect Storm), read Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers. I'm only 50 pages into Middlesex, but it thus far seems very promising.

SIGNING OFF: ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, "a high school dropout from Canada who transformed himself into one of the most urbane, well-traveled and recognizable journalists on American television", has passed away at 67.

The Washington Post's Marc Fisher wrote of his 9/11 reporting: "We watched Peter Jennings' beard grow, and we were somehow reassured that he did not shave, that through morning, afternoon, evening and on into the night, he did not leave the desk, that he confided in us his uncertainties, that he shared the confusions of each hour. He grew more pale and more vulnerable, as if he knew that we needed him to be human, so that we could be together."

THOMETHING THPETHIAL (REPRISE): After perusing everyone's comments on the summer reading post, I read Freakonomics this weekend. Other than an awful title (for some reason I'd originally thought that it was of the same genre as Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot), I thought the book was really terrific. Highly recommended to all ALOTT5MA readers, particularly those who, like myself, find themselves inexplicably drawn to scholarly works about trends in baby naming.

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